Crossing the Line: moving from old media concentration to new
media “skipping the intermediaries”

Summary

This document has the following components:

speaking notes for a presentation given to the Council of
Canadians in Ottawa on February 8, 20053

list of handouts given to commissioners

a series of answers to questions received from the
commissioners or from audience members in discussions. The first
question was one that I should have included in the presentation,
which is how this topic relates to Canada-US relations.

Crossing the Line: speaking notes from February 8 presentation.

The materials for this inquiry talk about foreign ownership as if
it were the most critical issue facing us as it relates to media and
cultural sovereignty. While ownership may be an important issue for
broadcast media, there is also a need to adequately evaluate new
media, such as the Internet.

By far the most powerful aspect of new media is the ability to
“skip intermediaries” and communicate directly between
creator and audience. This is a feature quite different than
broadcast media where the broadcaster always acts as an intermediary
between creator and audience.

This ability to “skip the intermediaries” is great for
decentralization of the media and of allowing a multiplicity of
voices. It is great for creators and audiences, but it is obviously
not so great for those old-media intermediaries that are being
bypassed. Their relevance will diminish as new media increasingly
replaces broadcast media as societies source of information and
entertainment.

The largest battle in new media is the attempts by old-media
intermediaries to re-intermediate new media and attempt to retain
their control over the production and distribution of cultural goods
and services, and retain control over the business models used within
the cultural and related sectors.

Protecting the future from the past

In a 2002 keynote4,
Lawrence Lessig5
suggested a refrain that if understood would explain many cultural
policy policy debates:

Creativity and innovation
always builds on the past.

The past always tries to
control the creativity that builds upon it.

Free societies enable the
future by limiting this power of the past.

Ours is less and less a free society.

This aspect of cultural policy has been with us since we created
free societies. Each time a new technology that enhances our creative
capacity comes along, the past has always tried to control it. This
was the case with songwriters when the player piano and “talking
machines” came along that created the recording industry, and
it was the case with the Motion Picture industry wanting to control
the VCR.

Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA), argued for the past in front of the United States
Congress in 19826
using the following words:

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film
producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the
woman home alone.

Imagine a world that had protected the past from the future, and
allowed the MPAA to control the VCR and derivative technology such as
the camcorder, or video editing tools which are now cheap enough to
have in the home. Not only has the motion picture industry seen
growth in sales due to the home theater market that the VCR sparked,
but these new technologies allowed the average citizen to become
creators of their own motion pictures.

This incalculable growth of human creativity would simply never
have been possible had the past been allowed to control the future.

The language we hear today from the recording industry about the
alleged harm to their industry from the Internet is nearly identical.
We hear from them that the sky is falling and that without an
immediate response from parliaments that creativity will die. Those
that understand the refrain I mentioned above will know this to be as
false as Jack Valenti's words, or the words of all of those who came
before him that tried to harm our free society by having the past
control the future.

The roll of Industry and Heritage Canada

The very different features of broadcast media and new media
causes a considerable amount of policy confusion. On example can be
seen in the discussion of Media and Culture issue7
for this part of the Citizens' Inquiry which suggested.

Thus far, the free traders at Industry Canada seem to
think this is a good idea, while the cultural protectionists at
Canadian Heritage are adamantly opposed.

Copyright policy is joint between Industry and Heritage, and the
view expressed by the Council of Canadians is opposite to what people
active in Copyright policy see. With copyright it is Heritage that is
wanting to mimic the policies that the United States has been pushing
internationally through WIPO and related trade organizations, and it
is Industry Canada that has been suggesting caution.

Recently the parliamentary Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage
released an Interim report on Copyright Reform8.
With the exception of one recommendation relating to photography
which had its own problems, each of the other 8 recommendations
promoted re-intermediation. This report regulates away much the
citizen enhancing features of new-media. Like the 1996 WIPO treaties
that they drew inspiration from, the intent was to allow those who
were the gatekeepers of culture in the past to control this new
media.

Creativity and innovation
always builds on the past.

The past always tries to
control the creativity that builds upon it.

Two types of past intermediary control

There are two broad categories of intermediaries: technical and
business model. Technical intermediaries are those who own and/or
control technologies which are used in communications. Business model
intermediaries are organizations who attempt to insert themselves
within economic transactions, such that the only way to make money
with a given type of creativity is to go through that intermediary.

Technological intermediaries

With broadcast media the owners are fairly clear, with it is well
understood that those who own a newspaper or television station have
influence over the content that will be communicated over that media.
This type of intermediary is part of the medium, and the ability for
the average citizen to skip a television station's ownership and
communicate with fellow citizens simply doesn't exist.

With new media the intermediaries are not always as obvious. When
using a computer to communicate most people believe the computer is
under their own control, obeying their commands. The computer is
actually obeying instructions that were encoded in computer software.
In this way software code can be seen as a type of law9.
Society must adequately understand this new form of regulation, often
coded by private interests, and how it interacts with laws passed by
democratically elected governments.

While the software could contain rules which obey the wishes of
owner of the computer, they can also be authored to deliberately
ignore the owner and instead obey the wishes of someone else. With
the author of the software in control of the computer, and not the
owner, this software becomes an intermediary which can exert any
control it wishes.

This type of intermediary is far more powerful than a broadcast
era intermediary given the level of secrecy that exists around the
rules being obeyed. In one case in the United States the very
discussion of the rules used in electronic voting machines was
claimed to be illegal10,
a subversion of the accountability and transparency of the electoral
process which should put the integrity of the election into question.

We all know the phrase “to err is human, to really fowl
things up requires a computer”, which when applied to public
policy suggests that parliaments are making extreme mistakes where
computers are involved.

This remote control of a computer is the purpose of what is often
called “Digital Rights Management” (DRM), one of the
techniques strongly supported by Heritage with their push to ratify
the 1996 re-intermediation WIPO treaties. I suspect they are
supporting this powerful new intermediary because they have trusted
the marketing brochures of the DRM software companies which falsely
claim that it will be the copyright holder that is in control11.

It is important to remember that any tool that can be used to
create and distribute a creative work can be abused to infringe the
creative rights of others. There is no way for the technology to know
the difference, and there are vested economic interests of incumbent
intermediaries to not differentiate infringement from competition.

Any attempt to use technological means to stop copyright
infringement will infringe on the creative, cultural and
communications rights of law abiding citizens. The ends simply can
not justify the means.

Business model intermediaries

In broadcast media there were a limited number of business models
possible, with royalty collection for any commercial communication or
copying of a creative work being seen as the only model possible.

With new media it is possible to “skip the intermediaries”
and build much more custom business models that match a
creator/audience relationship. Rather than charging a royalty for
every possible use, a creator can license some uses as royalty-free
and other uses as royalty-bearing, exploring ways to treat the
royalty-free distribution as low-cost marketing of other commercial
services.

The fastest growing part of the software marketplace is the
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS12)
sector. While the monopolies from the past software markets such as
Microsoft are still in wide use, many competitors believe that
switching to more innovative modern business models is the only way
to compete in this marketplace.

In the cultural marketplace there is a growth of the Creative
Commons movement which offers tools to help “skip the
intermediaries” by licensing creative works differently and
harness the power of the Internet. More and more works are being
released in licenses which authorize people to distribute the work
royalty-free on peer-to-peer networks, with the creators leveraging
this extremely cheap distributed distribution mechanism in support of
a variety of alternative business models.

The Business Software Alliance (BSA and CAAST)

A set of incumbent intermediaries are fighting back here as well13.
Each year the Business Software Alliance (BSA), and their Canadian
subsidiary the self-called Canadian Alliance Against Software Theft
(CAAST) release a so-called “global piracy study”.
Analysis of their statistical methodology indicates that they are
including competing business models such as those use by the FLOSS
sector as if it were “piracy”14.
They (ab)use these statistics to encourage governments to enact
policy which will favor their business model over any competitive
business model. Their stated mission is to reduce so-called “software
theft”, but are the strongest opposition to new business models
which largely solve this problem.

Non-repertoire Collective Societies

New types of intermediaries are also emerging in the form of
collective societies expanding themselves outside of their
repertoires, to being a government imposed intermediary in cases
where either (or neither) the copyright holder or the audience are
given a choice.

Collective societies were created to allow a group of copyright
holders to get together and create an agency that could provide a
“one stop shopping” service to potential audiences. Only
if a copyright holder joined the collective could that collective
offer licenses to a given work, and only if the audience was wanting
to make use of a work part of a collective's repertoire would they
need to pay that collective.

Collectives such as Access Copyright (for literary works),
Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC collects the levy on blank
audio recording media like blank CDs) and others have been granted or
are pushing for extended or statutory licenses. A good summary of the
common licensing types was included in the Interim report from
Heritage15:

Licensing could take one of three forms: voluntary
licensing, extended licensing, or compulsory licensing.

In voluntary licensing, copyright holders and
users contract directly with one another.

Extended licensing allows a copyright collective
society claiming to represent a “substantial” repertoire
of certain types of material to be recognized as representing the
entire international repertoire of such types of material, but
individual authors would have a right to “opt out” of the
collective society.

Under compulsory licensing, copyright owners are
legislatively required to allow use of their work according to
statutory described conditions and prices.

With voluntary licensing a full spectrum of business models are
supported, with freedom of choice existing for both creator and their
potential audiences. With either of extended of compulsory licensing
the government is picking business models, and an intermediary that
is collecting money now exists which can exhibit all the harmful
behavior of any other market monopoly.

Conclusions

We need to be very careful in how we handle this area of policy.
The commercial interests of the incumbent intermediaries can not be
allowed to be used to enact new government policy which will have
considerable unintended consequences. These unintended consequences
can have far more harmful impacts on society than even the worst
scenarios of the problems such as copyright infringement that we are
supposedly enacting these laws to reduce.

Unlike the case of other monopolies we are not talking about harm
only to a commercial marketplace or to consumer prices, but harm to
our ability to create and communicate ideas with fellow citizens.
Mistakes in this area of policy have implications on our ability to
protect human rights: directly with creator, cultural and
communications rights, and indirectly with most other rights16.

We need to always have this refrain in
our minds:

Creativity and innovation
always builds on the past.

The past always tries to
control the creativity that builds upon it.

Free societies enable the
future by limiting this power of the past.

Ours is less and less a free society.

Additional handouts for commissioners

TheOpenCD.org : This is a CD full of Free/Libre and Open
Source Software that can be installed in Microsoft Windows. While I
don't use any Microsoft software myself, I hand out CDs intended to
be used on Microsoft Windows as users of MacOS/X and Linux are
already familiar with FLOSS given their underlying operating systems
are FLOSS.

I personally use Fedora Core Linux, an operating
system that is managed by an international community with the
support of RedHat. RedHat was co-founded by Bob Young17
who also started LULU.com18,
Chairman for the Center for the Public domain19,
and the current owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats20.

Fading Ways Share Samplers: This is music from an independent
label in Toronto that believes that peer-to-peer distribution of
music is extremely helpful for musicians, and since the beginning of
2004 has released all new CDs licensed under a Creative Commons
license.

Creative Commons “mouse pad” that was handed out
at the September 30, 2004 launch of Creative Commons Canada21

Answers to questions about this presentation

Q: How does this topic relate to Canada-U.S. Relations?

Internationally when Intellectual Property is discussed there is a
divide between what the U.S. position is and the position of many
other countries. The United States is in a trade deficit situation
with most types of goods and services, with trade surpluses in areas
such as arms and “intangibles”. Most of the trade
surplus in intangibles relates to licensing fees for Intellectual
Property, making it quite rational that the United States Trade
Representative (USTR) and the Unites States Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO) would be very aggressively seeking to impose policy on
trade partners which allow the USA to maintain this trade surplus.

While many Canadians see the USA as Canada's largest trade
partner, the US is better understood as our largest economic
competitor. This trade surplus for the Unites States is a growing
trade deficit for Canada. In a competitive marketplace we need to
adopt policies which, if they can not explicitly favor Canadian
innovation and creativity, should at least support it. Most of the
innovation and cultural industry incumbents are based in the United
States, so a policy that protects incumbents from disruptive
innovation is a policy that favors US interests.

In the early 1990's the United States launched a National
Information Infrastructure (NII) initiative. As part of this
initiative there was a Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights,
which released a report in 199523
(often referred to as the"Lehman report").

Rather than seeking ways to regulate this new media to support a
full spectrum of development, distribution and business models, they
instead created recommendations that would make this new media "safe"
for the old-media incumbents. This is a direct opposition to a
market based approach that would have enabled new-media innovators
and creators to possibly disrupt established business processes with
better processes.

The USA took this extreme vision to WIPO, and in 1996 a watered
down set of treaties based on the U.S. recommendations were signed by
many countries. It is my understanding that it is quite common for a
country to sign a treaty without such a signature creating any
obligation to ratify if it is determined that the treaty is not in
the interests of the country.

The USA implemented their vision in their 1998 Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA)24
which came into force in 2000. The chill on innovation and
creativity has been considerable, especially with the USA arresting
foreign innovators. There are a growing number of innovators, myself
included, which started a boycott of any travel to the United States
due to this law. I submitted activities to Industry Canada as part
of the 2001 consultation25
that, if carried out by an American Citizen or within the US, would
have been in violation of the DMCA.

Since 1996, WIPO has seen far more balanced debate.
As a counter proposal to the "Lehman report" a number of
developing nations have come forward with a "development
agenda".

On October 4, 2004, the General Assembly of the World
Intellectual Property Organization agreed to adopt a proposal offered
by Argentina and Brazil, the "Proposal for the Establishment of
a Development Agenda for WIPO" (sometimes referred to as "Item
12" because of its placement listing on the meeting's agenda).
This proposal was strongly supported by developing countries, as well
as by a large contingent of civil society. Prior to the General
Assembly meeting, hundreds of nonprofits, scientists, academics and
other individuals had signed the "Geneva Declaration on the
Future of WIPO," which calls on WIPO to focus more on the needs
of developing countries, and to view IP as one of many tools for
development - not as an end in itself.26

As with attempts to have a meeting within WIPO on
Collaborative Development Models27,
the United States (USTR/USPTO) is aggressively opposed to any type of
balanced reform of WIPO that takes it away from the vision of an
organization promoting the interests of a small number of US
corporations.

Within Canada there are far too many politicians that
believe that the 1996 WIPO treaties represent some sort of
“international standard” and that we must rush to ratify.
When one looks at what countries have ratified, and under what type
of pressure from the US, it is obvious why many consider these
countries to be the “Coalition of the Billing”. Canada
should feel as free to have a response different than that of the USA
to cultural policy and the Internet as Canada has a different
response to what has been happening in Iraq and elsewhere.

Q: Who would be harmed if Canada ratified the 1996 WIPO treaties?

It is easier to answer this question in reverse, which is who will
benefit. If the WIPO treaties are fully successful, they will have
protected the incumbent media corporations and “software
manufacturing” vendors from any new competition. This means
that any of the democratizing possibilities of the Internet will have
been stifled, and we will have entered a many-channel broadcast
universe where the concept of “interactive” is reduced to
consumers being able to buy items advertised by broadcasters from
their set-top boxes.

The harm to creativity will likely have been far greater than if
the incumbents had got their way in the 1980's and the motion picture
industry was able to control the development of the VCR and
derivative technology. There has been so many positive things
written about the potential of the Internet, all of which assumed
that this new media would be able to develop independent of any
control by the monopolies from the old media.

This is not an issue about creators vs. users, as new media offers
considerable benefit over old-media to both creators and their
audiences. While some superstars that were made successful by the
old media may believe protecting established monopolies to be a good
thing, this is a view that is opposed to the promotion of creativity
generally.

In my 2003 submission to the Canadian parliament on their section
9228
review of the copyright act I spoke of the need to be aware of the
protection of human rights when reforming copyright. Far too many
people claim that protection of creators' rights is limited to
protecting the material and moral rights of past creativity,
ignoring the need to protect a creators right to build on past
creativity and to publicly communicate their works.

The authority
that I draw upon in my thinking about copyright policy are two
articles from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UNUDHR)29,
specifically article 19 and article 27.

Article
19.

Everyone
has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right
includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek,
receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.

Article
27.

Everyone
has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the
community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement
and its benefits.

Everyone
has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests
resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of
which he is the author.

We must never allow the copyright holders of past creativity to
substitute article 27(2) as being the only right relevant to creators
and creativity.

Q: You mentioned that your views may be different than those of
Sheila Copps?

When I found out who the commissioners were for the Ottawa
session, I was interested to see the dynamic between Sheila Copps and
Senator Laurier LaPierre.

I recently read “A Charter for the Cultural Citizen Online”30
, the report of the Canadian Culture Online National Advisory Board
where Mr. LaPierre was chair31.
This report specifically resisted being entrapped by “how
things used to be”, a very progressive way of looking at the
Internet as a great opportunity for Canadian creativity. I was told
that Mr. LaPierre had considerable influence on this report, and that
it was his visionary thinking I was reading.

Sheila Copps was the Minister of Canadian Heritage when I became
more intimately involved in this area of policy in the summer of
200132
. Our community quickly learned that she was the driving force in
Canada behind the policies which we opposed.

While trying since the summer of 2001 to meet with the Minister, I
meet Ms. Copps for the first time at the Minister's Forum33
on Copyright on April 4th, 2003. This was a forum where
the Copyright Policy Branch of Heritage invited 30 creators involved
in copyright to a forum that was taped for CPAC.

Prior to the taping, Minister Copps circulated a reception and
spoke to different people. We spoke very briefly about what I am
involved in with collaborative development models, and our different
needs under copyright. She quickly dismissed what I had to say
claiming I was “giving away my rights”, and that while
that was my right that this should not affect her claim that we
needed to strengthen and broaden copyright. This was a view almost
verbatim to what we see from the United States, a view quit different
from Mr. LaPierre. Ms. Copps was very trapped by “how things
used to be” and was seeking to protect that past from the
future.

When Ms. Copps was fighting a nomination battle in her Hamilton
riding in the beginning of 2004, I wrote an article offering my
perspective of her as a copyright reformer34.
It contrasted her policy position with those of Hamilton hometown
hero Bob Young (owner of the Hamilton Tigercats). Bob Young made his
money through his company RedHat35,
a company that could not have existed if Ms. Copps vision had already
been implemented.

Q: Why is there so much animosity in discussions of copyright,
especially between those on “the left”

As part of my work I have tried to connect with other creators36.
In these conversations it became clear we share many common goals.
We all wish to allow Canadian creators to create, and to be able to
get paid for our creativity. We agree on basic questions of the
public interest such as the protection of moral and material rights
for creators, a healthy growing public domain, freedom of expression
and protection from censorship. We want all Canadians to become
creators if they so chose, and to be able to be successful without
artificial barriers.

Where we have very strong disagreements is how to accomplish these
goals, especially when we each see the proposals from the other as
harming these shared goals.

In the seventies one of the critical issues for Canadian writers
was a lack of Canadian publishers. Writers got together and helped
facilitate the creation of these publishers. They were fighting
against primarily foreign publishers that did not have an interest in
supporting Canadian writers. They were trying to “skip an
intermediary”, providing a method for Canadian writers to
publish books.

Many more supportive organizations were built, including the
Writers Union and what is now called Access Copyright (formerly
CANCOPY). These were all intended to support Canadian writers, and I
would agree that overall they were accomplishing their goal in the
past.

In the 1990's we saw the birth of the Internet and other digital
media, and the nature of the battles changed. The new issue was not
whether the publishers or other existing intermediaries were Canadian
or not, but whether old-media style editorial control was to be
imposed, and who was imposing it. With the power of computer
software the ability of an intermediary to control the activities of
a creator or other citizen is considerable, especially when this
software is “closed source” meaning that the rules it
enforced were not accountable or transparent.

The innovation we saw on the Internet, whether it be Email or the
Web, happened without requiring permission. It also happened using
open standards and mostly FLOSS software. Had permission been
required of either the telecommunications companies or the existing
broadcast content industry, it should be obvious that this permission
would not have been granted. Clearly many activities on the Internet
are in competition with a large number of established old-media
interests.

Unfortunately those organizations that were formed by
creators to protect their interests in the 70's and 80's see new
media as a threat for the business models that they helped to
promote. Access Copyright is not seen as representing creators, but
representing one narrow business model used by writers. While it is
quite unfortunate, battle lines have now been drawn between younger
creators who support the full spectrum of possibilities offered by
new media, and older generation creators who oppose any disruption of
their legacy business models and distribution mechanisms.

I support a full spectrum of development models,
distribution models and business models. If a creator wishes to use
a traditional development model (possibly one author), distribution
model (traditional book publishing industry) and business model
(royalties paid per book sold), I support their right to do so. For
my own creativity I favor new development models (commons-based peer
production37),
distributing via the Internet (using Peer-to-peer file-sharing when
file or audience size is large). I charge a one-time fee for
value-add requested by customers, or some other business model that
does not require counting/monitoring (or suing) users such as
charging royalty fees.

Where the most animosity can be seen is when incumbent
creators, or more often intermediary business associations or
collective societies, claim that any competing methods do not exist
or are “theft”. They suggest that one-to-many centrally
controlled broadcast-style methods are the only way to distribute
cultural goods, and that the Internet should be reconfigured (via
changes in the law) to only allow this method of distribution. They
suggest the only business model is collecting royalties on each use,
going to far as to claim that copyright is simply a right of
remuneration. They have promoted changes to the law to replace
copyright with a right of remuneration, making any alternative
business models impossible to implement.

While our community has been quite willing to try to
work with incumbent creators, these creators have generally been hard
to convince to be open minded and allow the co-existence of a full
spectrum of expressions of creative rights.

One of the most powerful tools we are using to try to
break free from the incumbents is the concept of “some rights
reserved” from Creative Commons, Free/Libre and Open Source
Software, and others. Where in the 1970's writers were trying to
create Canadian publishers to protect their ability to have Canadian
voices heard through the monopoly publishing industry of the day, the
modern equivalent are those who are trying to use innovative
licensing models. Neil Leyton of Fading Ways Music38
is working both in Canada and in Europe to build an International
Creative Commons label movement to try to protect musicians rights
from what he sees to be the greatest threat, the incumbent major
labels and the excessive control of their industry associations.

1Russell
McOrmond is a self-employed Open Systems/Standards/Software Internet
Consultant. http://flora.ca/
(Accessed January 31, 2005). He not only believes that "code is
law", but also that "law is code" and spends much of
his time "hacking" this type of code.

5Lawrence
Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of
the school's Center for Internet and Society.
http://www.lessig.org/bio/short/
(Accessed February 5, 2005).

6Hearings
before the subcommittee on courts, civil liberties, and the
administration of justice of the committee on the judiciary, house
of representatives, ninety-seventh congress, second session: Home
recording of copyrighted works. http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm
(Accesses February 5, 2005)

11I
gave more detail on who is in control in “I, copyright cop!
Who controls the digital security guards?”
http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/copyright-cops.html
(Accessed January 31, 2005)There has been ongoing discussion of
this issue in the Digital Copyright Canada forum, including
discussions of the market failure that will exist even in situations
with ineffective DRM running on non-DRM platforms (Generic computers
running non-DRM operating systems)
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/discuss/4345
(Accessed January 31, 2005)

14CAAST
misinformation - how do they count?
http://weblog.flora.ca/article.php3?story_id=272
(Accessed February 5, 2005)Summary: CAAST counts the number of
computers sold and does a wishful-thinking estimate of how much of a
demand there should be for their software. They then subtract the
actual sales of their software, and define the difference as
infringement. CAAST can not be trusted to estimate the demand for
competing software any more than a candidate from one political
party can publicly estimate the demand for votes for their
opponents.

16The
United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights
http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
(Accessed January 31, 2005) lists many different rights. Copyright
policy directly impacts articles 19 (communications rights) and 27
(cultural and creators' rights). With the ability of intermediaries
to exercise editorial control, even regulating who may publish at
all, this will have implications for property rights (part of
ownership includes the right to control for lawful purposes),
privacy rights, democratic rights, educational rights, etc...

28Submission
to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in
regards to its section 92 copyright act review and report.
http://www.flora.ca/copyright2003/
(Accessed February 21, 2005)

32I
became involved to respond to the threat that Canada may implement
the USA's DMCA in Canada. This was how the potential ratification
of the 1996 WIPO treaties was being referenced, with few knowing
what WIPO was but most technology or Internet practitioners being
fully aware of the harm of the DMCA. I started a forum called
Canada-DMCA-opponents, which was the precursor to the Digital
Copyright Canada forum. The first message was posted on August 2,
2001 http://www.digital-copyright.ca/discuss/1
(Accessed February 21, 2005)

37The
term "commons-based peer production" was first introduced
by Yochai Benkler in his paper “Coase's Penguin, or Linux and
the Nature of the Firm”.
http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
(Accessed Febuary 21, 2005)

38Fading
Ways Music is an independent music label, primarily operating out of
Toronto, Canada, but also with offices and street teams in Europe
http://www.fadingwaysmusic.com/
(Accessed February 21, 2005)